DPG #2 or should I say DPPG or possibly DPPI

 We're hearing a lot about DPIs - Digital Public Infrastructure (the Internet, the spectrum for mobile telephone,  open banking networking etc)....

So then there's a lot of talk about building new Infrastructures for (e.g.) Digital Identity - and provisioning this through Public Private Partnerships - so really we then have a DPPI - indeed, the Internet and WWW and Cloud serve as an example of just that too.

But then we have Digital Public Goods - for me, this is an extension of the notion of open source - so again the software that runs the Internet is available in open source form, together with documentation, and even much test data (simulators too). 

But new systems have evolved new forms of ownership, so a lot of the digital content in the Internet is a mix of open (free) and open access but not free to re-purpose (e.g. copyright owners want recompense) - this showed up first in music/file sharing networks, now subsumbed by systems like Youtube - which have to navigate the ownership space carefully .

New forms of digital goods now include trained models (AIs - e.g. LLMs) - these derive value from the data they are trained on (supervised, therefore involving human labour too, or unsupervised), so we then have a new form we might call a DPPG, something that has a mix of properties of public goods and private goods. 

This needs careful consideration, since a lot of IP rights are being skated over right now - the old "move fast and break things" is being applied by some unscrupulous (or to be more generous, just careless) organisations.

Is OpenAI just napsterising the stuff in the common crawl that has clear limits on commercial/for profit re-use (code and data)?

A couple more points about the Public/Private Partnership aspect of digital infrastructure (and goods). 

The Internet was public til 1992. Then the US government divested, so the birth of commercial ISPs happened. Later, ISPs got big enough to own transmission infrastructure (fiber, last mile copper, spectrum etc). Some of the net remained state provided (from my narrow UK perspective, examples are the UK JANET network for research&education and the NHS spine for health services - there are plenty like that) - there are also community provided networks (e.g. Guifi in Spain) that are collectively owned and operated. In the process of federating these together various tools and techniques emerged for "co-opetition" - things like BGP for routing, CA transparency for certificates etc -these are also examples of how to co-exist in a PPP world and they have (mostly) worked for the 32 years since then.

So there are interfaces between components provided using different models (public, private, community). And these change over time (both the technical and the legal, regulatory, business relationships).

The other thing here is time scales - the Boeing 747 ("Jumbo Jet") has had a product lifetime from 1963 until 2023. Software to model it (from wind tunnel tests, to avionics etc) has to run until the last one stops flying. That's 60 years so far. Any DPPG (software artefact, digital twin etc) being designed today better have a design lifetime of at least 100 years. Yes, that is right. One Hundred Years. Not of solitude.

What sorts of businesses have survived unscathed for these sorts of timescales, and what models do they use (my university is 800+ years old, and then there's the Vatican:) Quite a lot of nation states have not lasted that long.